TOURISM in SERVICE of OCCUPATION and ANNEXATION by Halah Ahmad

Al-Shabaka Policy Brief Policy Al-Shabaka October 2020 TOURISM IN SERVICE OF OCCUPATION AND ANNEXATION By Halah Ahmad Tourism, and religious tourism more specifically, plays support Palestinian self-determination through ethical a direct role in legitimizing and expanding Israeli tourism. theft of Palestinian land. As annexation attempts [email protected] under Netanyahu’s far right-wing government backed Tourism as Key to Zionist Settler by a Trump White House flagrantly violate global Colonialism human rights governance and international law, Israeli tourism in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) Since its founders set their sights on Palestine in fundamentally enables this expansion while rendering the late 19th century, the Zionist colonial project vacationers and tourism businesses complicit. Indeed, has professed to offer superior governance and multiple organizations have critiqued tourism within intelligence in settling the land.1 Indeed, in 1944, illegal Israeli settlements, as well as the role of various David Ben-Gurion, a leader in the Zionist movement businesses in settlement expansion. and Israel’s first prime minister, delivered his famous speech, “The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution,” This brief discusses the historic and continuing role in which he suggests that Jewish laborers would be of the tourism industry in the early Zionist movement teachers who bring “modern cultural, scientific, and and the contemporary Israeli state’s settler colonial technical knowledge” to make “the wilderness bloom.” project, in particular through propagating biblical ideas Zionist iconography from the early 20th century of eternal Jewish belonging in Palestine, and racist reflects these notions of superior Jewish development narratives of Jewish-Israeli superiority over Arabs in and “Hebrew Labor.” Moshe Shertok, Israel’s second terms of governance and intelligence. The glorification prime minister, echoed this idea with pejorative views of Israel in Israeli touristic advertising as an impressive of Arabs: “We have not come to an empty land to modern state that manifests providential continuity inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from www.Al-Shabaka.org with a biblical past obscures its ongoing displacement, people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its oppression, and exploitation of Palestinians. language and savage culture.”2 The brief builds on existing literature on problematic Early Zionist advertising produced by the Tourist religious tourism in Israel and Palestine and offers a Development Association of Palestine utilized case study to illustrate the pernicious facets of the vibrant imagery and religious symbolism to encourage industry. The brief also provides a look into the role European Jews to immigrate to Palestine, a key of tourism in denying Palestinians the right to develop example of which is the famous “Visit Palestine” a tourism industry for their own economic benefit, poster designed by Franz Krausz in 1936. The as Israel undercuts Palestinian access to their sites objectives of posters commissioned by the Tourist of archeological, religious, and natural significance. Development Association of Palestine were not to Finally, it draws attention to effective initiatives aimed encourage temporary visits, but, in fact, to encourage at raising awareness about Israel’s harmful tourism permanent immigration. industry and offers recommendations for enabling tourists, pilgrims, and international civil society to 1. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 7. 1 2. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 91. October 2020 During the early waves of Zionist settlement in Moslem Quarter has churches and mosques, and there Palestine, Zionist organizations also emphasized are several Jewish homes and Yeshivas still remaining,” investment in hotels, with several dozen emerging while omitting that Jewish homes in that quarter have between 1917 and 1948. Importantly, the Tourist been acquired recently, often by extremist Zionist Development Association of Palestine also used settler colonists backed by the Israeli military.5 maps of Palestine to depict biblical Jewish sites on More recently, as the Israeli government has promised top of existing topographies, ultimately constructing annexation of the Jordan Valley and parts of the West a visual anchor both for imagining Jewish continuity Bank, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism has emphasized in Palestine from antiquity to the present, and for tourism in West Bank settlements as an area of strategic planning extensive colonial settlement that would investment. To be sure, this encompasses tourism in obscure any notion of Palestinian belonging. Israeli-controlled settlements deemed illegal under international law, and excludes Palestinian cities and Zionists deployed archaeology in an endless pursuit to towns, most of which Israelis are forbidden from legitimize their claims to the land. As anthropologist entering by the Israeli state. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues in her landmark book, Facts on the Ground, Zionist organizations and early Israeli Israel’s tourism campaigns in the West Bank, in addition society in the 1950s and 60s emphasized archeology as to the development of archeological tourist sites on a “national hobby” which was crucial to the “formation occupied Palestinian lands, reinscribe the illegal theft and enactment of colonial-national imagination and of Palestinian land. Both historic and present tourism in the substantiation of its territorial claims.”3 Indeed, partaking in the illegal settlement enterprise fast-track Edward Said noted that Zionists actively removed Israeli annexation within the larger Zionist colonial Palestine and Palestinians from the historical record project, and are complicit in denying Palestinians the through tourism predicated on selective archeology right to their land and to self-determination. and orientalist depictions of Arabs and Palestinians.4 In other words, archeology was a tool of legitimation tied The Damaging Impacts of Settlement fundamentally to touristic and communal recreation, Tourism forming the basis for what have emerged as some of the most popular touristic destinations in the present. Illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT constitute Since its creation in 1948, the state of Israel has upheld threats to Palestinian self-determination. They also the Zionist agenda, with a narrative of infrastructural, deny Palestinian access to, and use of, natural and intellectual, and productive superiority over the cultural resources. Indeed, settlers’ exploitation of Palestinian population it continues to suppress through these resources for tourism obstructs Palestinian military occupation and continued displacement. economic development, creating dependency on Moreover, today, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism foreign aid and advancing the prosperity of Israel’s perpetuates notions of Israeli advancement and colonial settlement enterprise. That is, the success and superior intelligence alongside tenuous and refutable sustainability of Israel’s colonial enterprise through claims to biblical histories that provide a false sense of settlement tourism depends on the wider economic and continuity with the past. military suppression inflicted upon Palestinians through settlements. Israel’s continued utilization of biblical narratives that exclude Palestinians in official guides and tours is To illustrate the extent of Israel’s colonial enterprise in especially visible in Jerusalem, the epicenter of religious the OPT, it is important to contextualize the disparate tourism. Israeli tour guides in Jerusalem particularly access to land and resources between Palestinians target Christian and Jewish visitors, with itineraries and and the Israeli state. Notably, over 60% of the West site descriptions that often exclusively highlight Judeo- Bank constitutes Area C, which falls under full Israeli Christian histories. In 2011, the Ministry of Tourism administrative and military control. A 2017 UN OCHA described Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter as follows: “The report indicated that over 10% of the West Bank is 3. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2. 4. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 158. 2 5. Yara Hawari, “The Old City of Jerusalem; Whose Heritage? Tourism, Narratives and Orientalism” (unpublished thesis, 2011) page 22, typescript. October 2020 within settlement municipal boundaries, constituting Israel also actively denies Palestinians economic additional buffer zones surrounding settlements to development in their own tourism sector by restricting which Palestinians are forbidden access. While the the movement of tourists, Palestinian tourism physical boundaries of the settlements constitute under professionals, and tourism vehicles. In the December 5% of the West Bank, a 2013 UN Human Rights 2017 report, the PLO documented the disparate Council report indicated that over 43% of the West licensing practices of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, Al-Shabaka Policy Brief Policy Al-Shabaka Bank is under the jurisdiction of Israeli settlement finding that Israeli tour guides numbered over 8,000 in councils. Additionally, the report showed that these approved access permits to sites

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